New Hampshire Union Leader - Pearl Harbor Victim Coming Home at Last

News Article

By Paul Feely

For Tom Gray, the idea that he could soon bury his cousin in New Hampshire - more than 70 years after he was killed during the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor - is almost too good to be true.

"After the years we've spent on this, all the letters, emails and conversations, to think my family will finally have some closure ... it's hard to find the words," Gray said Wednesday from his home in Guilford, Conn. "It's not going to happen tomorrow, but I'm confident that Edwin will be coming home."

On Dec. 7, 1941, 3rd Class Fireman Edwin Hopkins from Swanzey was killed while serving aboard the battleship USS Oklahoma, which was hit by nine torpedoes and capsized at anchor in Pearl Harbor.

Gray (actually Hopkins' second cousin) and other relatives have been campaigning for several years for Hopkins' remains in Hawaii to be exhumed for burial next to his parents in a family plot in the Woodland Cemetery in Keene.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) announced the remains of up to 388 sailors and Marines who died aboard the USS Oklahoma would be returned to their families.

The remains will be exhumed later this year and transferred to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency laboratory in Hawaii.

Criteria for identification include research, family reference samples for DNA comparison and medical and dental records of the service members.

"The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency is prepared to begin this solemn undertaking in concert with ongoing worldwide recovery missions," Navy Rear Adm. Mike Franken, the agency's acting director, said in a news release.

After the attacks, 35 crew members were positively identified and buried. During salvage operations from June 1942 to May 1944, the remaining service members' remains were removed from the ship and initially interred as unknowns in Hawaii's Nuuanu and Halawa cemeteries.

In 1947, all remains in those cemeteries were disinterred for attempted identification. From those efforts, 27 unknowns from the USS Oklahoma were proposed for identification based on dental comparisons, but all of the proposed identifications were rejected.

Gray said an anthropologist working on the project refused to certify his cousin's remains, and they were classified as unknown.

Gray believes the anthropologist wouldn't certify the identity of Hopkins' remains because investigators recovered only his skull. Hopkins was identified through dental records, according to Gray.

By 1950, all unidentified remains associated with the ship were re-buried as unknowns at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the "Punchbowl," in Honolulu.

In March 2014, Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., coauthored a letter requesting that Pentagon officials grant the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command's Central Identification Laboratory's request to exhume five "unknown" caskets and identify the remains inside. This past February, Ayotte and Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., wrote to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel to push DoD to approve the exhumation and identification of all of the remains.

"I am glad that the Department of Defense has agreed to honor the wishes of family members, like the family of 3rd Class Fireman Edwin Hopkins of Swanzey, who have waited years for the remains of their loved ones to be identified and returned for proper burial," Sen. Ayotte said. "These fallen heroes and their families deserve to be treated with the utmost dignity, care and respect, and I am honored to have worked with defense officials on their behalf."

"My family and I can't say enough about the work done by Sen. Ayotte and (Connecticut) Sen. Blumenthal on this," Gray said. "They have worked on our behalf with the DoD, and without their efforts I think I could have spent the rest of my life without reaching a conclusion to this."

"Members of our Armed Forces pledge never to leave a fallen comrade behind," Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., said in a statement. "More than seven decades later, we will honor that commitment to sailors and Marines - including at least one Granite Stater - who made the ultimate sacrifice aboard the USS Oklahoma at Pearl Harbor. I am pleased the department has agreed to help reunite the families of the brave men that served aboard USS Oklahoma with the remains of their loved ones."

Gray said he expects the process could take up to five years, but he's hoping the wait will be much less for Hopkins.

"He was identified," Gray said. "We know where he is. And we know he's coming home."

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